In US, Trump Administration has announced sweeping changes to the H-1B work visa selection process, replacing the long-standing random lottery with a weighted system that prioritises higher-skilled and higher-paid foreign workers. The move, Department of Homeland Security (DHS) said, is aimed at better protecting the wages, working conditions, and job opportunities of American workers, while strengthening the integrity of the H-1B nonimmigrant visa program.
US Citizenship and Immigration Services spokesman Matthew Tragesser said the existing random selection process of H-1B registrations was exploited and abused by US employers who were primarily seeking to import foreign workers at lower wages than they would pay American workers. The new weighted selection will better serve Congress’s intent for the H-1B program and strengthen America’s competitiveness by incentivising American employers to petition for higher-paid, higher-skilled foreign workers, he said.
Under the new regulation, H-1B visas will no longer be awarded through a purely random draw, as has been the practice over the past two decades. Instead, registrations will be ranked and selected through a weighted process that increases the probability that visas go to higher-skilled and higher-paid foreign nationals, while still allowing employers to petition for workers across all wage levels, DHS said in a media release.
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